Sue Stewart
Walking with Poetry

21 August 2011
From Fermyn Woods Country Park to Lyveden New Bield

 
Poet and Creative Writing Fellow of Stirling University Sue Stewart lead members of the public on the Encounters walk, making connections between participants, walking, and the landscape through poetry.

Listening to work by both contemporary and traditional poets, and from Sue’s own repertoire, along the route, participants created their own poetry in response to the environment. A selection of which follow below:

 
Unfinished

There you stand unfinished
Full of history, yet empty
You’re full of secrets, yet your secrets are known
Blemished yet beautiful
Weathered yet strong
Riddled with bad fortune, yet reminding us how fortunate we are
Complicated, yet soothing
Solitary, yet surrounded
An undignified past, yet a dignified future
There you stand unfinished, yet perfect

Charlotte Harrison
 
 
When will you be happy?

I will be happy when the sun is shining
I will be happy when my family surrounds me
I will be happy when I am walking barefoot along the seashore
I will be happy when I see the beautiful flowers
I will be happy listening to music, especially next Sunday at the Opera
I will be happy reading in my new chill out room
I will be happy when we finally take that Nile Cruise / Safari / holiday of a lifetime
I will be happy when I manage to finally lose some more weight
I will be happy when my Yr 11′s pass their English GCSE’s on Thursday
I will be happy when the world is a better, safer, peaceful place for more of us
I will be happy with no more war
I will be happy when I next see the lovely happy smiling faces of my granddaughters
I will be happy when I have answered the phone, sent an email and delivery note tomorrow while I stand in for Claire
I will be happy if I get tickets to Wimbledon
I will be happy if John gets tickets for the 100m final in the 2012 Olympics
Actually today, as we have had time to ‘stand and stare’
At the beautiful countryside, listening to poetry, on a lovely sunny day
I am happy now

Julie Steventon
 
 
Birthday Poem

And so I age another year
In times past that would mean a beer
(or three)
But too many suns have gone around now, I fear
(for me)
So now I celebrate with Nature’s cheer

Gary Wilkinson
 
 
The Dream of Heaven

From your prison
Your mind flew there
And planted a garden
An orchard or trees
For friends to walk and marvel and see
Your heaven in symbols
And colour – the life to be
The times turned against you
Your issue disappointed and dead
But the children of the future
Inherited instead
They walk in your garden
Beneath the blue sky
And ponder and wonder and want to know why?
Your faith and your passion
Created a place to inquire and dream
On a sunny Sunday
We pick the fruit from the trees you meant to be
And contemplate Creation

Queen Maur the Memer
Maureen Nayler
 
 
Lyveden
I’m sitting in Lyveden New Bield
Having walked here and feeling fulfilled
The building’s unfinished
It’s grandeur diminished
But the builders were nonetheless skilled

Francis Tresham
 
 
Walking from Fermyn Woods to Lyveden New Bield

the forest wasn’t Frost’s snowy silence
inviting thoughts like bones
nor Houseman’s cherry-loveliest
but a welter-green chaos of leaves
indefinitely shifting their flittings
with names I only know from words
not from the hot tumultuous earth
and steady rock I cannot find
beneath the matted damp fecundity

the open field’s mono-culture broken stalks
laid bare as Clare’s shaken thoughts
his anger and his loss
become the dome’s relentless blue
insistent centre
despite frail shadows’ wavering
companionship and hints of passing time

a clearing’s old harmonium-song
gives trees a gothic longing
arching in green mosaic
from brief fullness between silence
to the golden bricks of a
dream’s unfinished yearning

Gis Hoyle
 
 
Ruin in Spring

In these spring green days an unlikely pale golden,
roofless grandeur grieves the tender sun.
To it alone no stirring life returns, save only
the crows in holes where beams once spanned the sky
in tiers, for buttery and feasting hall,
for shelter and for dancing, but even then,
long before the birds found their way in,
only unfinished ghosts woke to music here.

And tentative fingers of light fail to reach the deep inside,
shadows drag at insubstantial hopes
to be in courteous magnificence,
everything once believed of heaven;
now a lonely staircase, over-reaching,
leads to an almost cloudless sky.

But the garden dreams on defiantly – part of the
warm world turning in ducks and blue and apple orchard.
Beyond the spiral mounds’ hesitant charm, what’s lost
becomes a present beauty: terraced grace beside the
restful lapping of green water and flashing stately fish.

Then the winding dignity returns
from forest and deer park to the dark lodge,
blind windows tell the aching absence of the past.

Gis Hoyle 2008
 
 
PARENTS
POET
MEN
SHADE
OVER BEARING CHOIR
WORDS
WAYS

WEAVING
STONE
HORSESHOE
TRAILS
OPENING TO CROP FIELD
BAREFOOT
BALES

Anonymous
 
 
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